‘Voices of Ballard and Beyond’ tells the stories of Pacific Northwest Nordic Community

The stories of Ballard’s rich Nordic history are now immortalized in “Voices of Ballard and Beyond,” a book about the growth of the Nordic community in the Pacific Northwest. The book recently won two awards, including the 2013 Virginia Marie Folkins Award for an “exemplary historical publication” from the Association of King County Historical Organizations and a Washington Museum Association Award of Project Excellence.

The content for the book was collected through a series of interviews as part of the Nordic American Voices Oral History Initiative, “an ambitious effort to collect, preserve, and share the life histories of Nordic immigrants and their descendants in the Pacific Northwest,” according to the Nordic Heritage Museum. The museum tells us the book builds on “Voices of Ballard: Immigrant Stories from the Vanishing Generation,” which is a 1999 joint effort from the Swedish Finn Historical Society, the Ballard Historical Society, and the Nordic Heritage Museum.

The book was written with the help from 29 volunteers who collected over 800 hours of combined interviews.

From the Nordic Heritage Museum:

“When asked to participate, many people say they really don’t have anything remarkable to relate, that their lives were quite ordinary,” says project coordinator Gordon Strand. “More often than not we hear very captivating stories about people living, often heroically, through some of the great events of the 20th century. This is history from the bottom up. It is not the saga of generals and great political leaders. We are hearing about the way people and families survived, coped and even flourished through two world wars, a great depression and the transition to life in a new world and the constant effort to retain ethnic traditions.”

For a copy of the book, visit the Nordic Heritage Museum gift shop, or order online by emailing orders@nordicmuseum.org. For more information or for an excerpt of the book, click here.